The Ballymara Road

by Nadine Dorries

  Suddenly, it was as though an icy blast had shot through their little kitchen on Queens Drive. She had uttered the words guaranteed to ruin Ben’s day.

  For the first five years following his discharge, Ben’s mother ceaselessly harped on about his finding a wife until suddenly, without any warning, one day when his leg was particularly painful, Ben had exploded. It was the one and only time he had ever shouted at his mother and now, here she was, poking at his wound once more. Not the one she could see, the visible wound that made her heart ache for the physical discomfort etched on his face when he returned home from a long day at work, but the invisible wound. The raw, lonely, aching wound Ben carried inside.

  ‘Please don’t, Mother.’ His voice was calm but cold as steel. ‘You know the terrible row we had last time you brought this up. Nothing has altered. I don’t want a wife.’

  Mrs Manning put both of her elbows on the table and leant forward earnestly, nursing her teacup in both hands and speaking across the rim.

  ‘Ben, I will soon have had my threescore year and ten. How can I die a happy woman, knowing you will be all alone?’

  Ben carefully returned the marmalade spoon to the pot, replaced the lid and kept his eyes focused on his toast.

  ‘No woman wants to marry a cripple, Mother. It would be a hugely unfair thing to ask anyone and, besides, no self-respecting woman would look twice at this contraption.’ He glanced down at his leg.

  He no longer felt like eating his breakfast and slowly, with the aid of his stick, rose from the table.

  ‘I have to leave. The meeting at St Mary’s Priory begins at nine-thirty. I had better start out now as I need to change buses at the Pier Head and make my way down to Nelson Street.’

  ‘Nelson Street? Heavens above, you are right in the middle of them all down there at the docks. You can’t move for bog jumpers.’

  ‘Mother.’ Ben’s voice rose sharply in condemnation, even though he had heard the expression so many times. It was commonly used amongst those who were not of Irish descent.

  Ben took down his coat from the hook on the hall dresser that stood adjacent to the front door. His mother scooped up his plate from the table with annoyance and banged it down on the draining board next to the kitchen sink.

  ‘We need to be a bit less welcoming, if you ask me, and then maybe a few more of them would go back home,’ she shouted from the kitchen.

  ‘No wonder the Irish stick together if they have to face comments like that. What would you do in their shoes? I feel obliged now to let the church have whatever they want with the nursery and the library.’

  Once outside, Ben let out a long breath. He had closed the front door with unaccustomed force. He hadn’t realized how much his mother irritated him when she was mean about others and harped on about their taboo subject, his finding a wife.

  ‘That is never going to happen,’ he whispered to himself, leaning on his stick as he began his walk to the bus stop.

  9

  ‘WATCH THE ROAD now, Mr Curtis, ’tis a good stretch from here to Dublin. A few hours and you will be safe, back home with your good wife. I am delighted, so I am, that all was in order and you will come again, will you? We will be looking forward to it, won’t we, Sister Celia? And be sure to give us plenty of notice now as we wouldn’t want you to travel all this way and be hungry, not even for a second, would we, Sister Celia?’

  Sister Assumpta was bidding farewell to the visiting councillors and do-gooders who had called to inspect the laundry and the mother and baby home.

  ‘Watch the vans on that road, will you. The boys driving the delivery vans from the village are just demons, the way they speed along that road. They can drive at forty miles an hour, some of them, so the man who delivers the laundry from the hotel in Galway told me, and he is a good Catholic, he never misses mass and would never tell a lie, isn’t that so, Sister Celia?’

  And the car doors slammed. One. After. The. Other.

  At the sound of the car engine starting up, she waved to the retreating boot of a Ford Cortina.

  Sister Assumpta and Sister Celia were both rather too enthusiastically waving goodbye to the councillors who were visiting from the county offices.

  They had asked far too many questions for the Reverend Mother’s liking.

  She stomped back down the corridor to her office, Sister Celia bustling behind in her wake, struggling to keep up.

  ‘The nerve of them,’ she ranted, once she had closed the big double wooden doors behind them. ‘Fancy asking me to make sure all my tracks are covered. Can you believe they used those words? You would not believe the nerve of them, would you now?’

  ‘No, Reverend Mother,’ Sister Celia gasped. Unused to moving so quickly, she was already puffing and red in the face. It had been a hard day, what with visitors probing around her ovens and making her nerves jangle. ‘I’ve felt like a mad woman all day, trying to keep the surliest of those ungrateful girls out of the way. God alone knows, the moon would crack itself if one of them smiled. They were no sight for visitors, so they weren’t, and ye just never know when one of them might try something on, like turning on the waterworks.’

  ‘You were right, Sister Celia. This visit must have something to do with the cut of that interfering woman, Rosie O’Grady, that busybody of a matron. She has never stopped asking questions and probing into our business since her family brought that girl here from Liverpool.’

  ‘Well, they did say that their next visit was St Vincent’s, so she must have reported them too. Did they say what we have to do?’ asked Sister Celia, aware that after such an important visit, there must at least be something required of them in terms of how they functioned. The officials had taken lots of notes.

  ‘We have to make sure that our own records don’t reflect the bank transactions, nor identify which payments come from which government departments, nor for which girls the payments are made. We have to keep everything confidential. As if we didn’t already. They must think we came down with the last shower. Why do they think we change everyone’s names the minute they arrive?’

  ‘Are we still claiming for the two girls who escaped? Aideen and Agnes?’ asked Sister Celia.

  ‘We are that,’ Sister Assumpta threw Sister Celia a sharp look, ‘but we have to be careful. If you ask me, ’tis no coincidence at all that they became very friendly with the midwife and it was they who delivered the baby of the midwife’s girl, Cissy. As sure as God is true, I know she has had something to do with their escape. Not for one minute would she admit it, though. Someone outside the Abbey helped those girls get away. They could not have done it without help. There must have been a car at the very least.’

  ‘Maybe someone on the road gave them a lift if they got through the gates?’

  ‘You know, that could be true. Maybe we need to employ a gate man as St Vincent’s have done. We can do without runaways and that’s the truth.’

  Sister Assumpta flopped into her office chair with little grace and began opening her mail. The official visit had put her a day behind and had thrown the Abbey routine into disarray. In preparation, the areas shown to the visitors had been scrubbed spick and span. Many of the girls with children in the nursery would not see their babies for a week, as a result of the extra work made necessary by the visit.

  ‘It will soon be time for lunch, Sister Celia. I shall have mine whilst I see to the bills in the post. ‘I will eat in the office today, but first, to prayers.’

  Both women bustled off towards the chapel as the sound of bells called them to prayer.

  Sister Assumpta, although disturbed and made bad-tempered by the visit, breathed a sigh of relief. They had survived. The officials hadn’t asked to see any further than the first few sinks in the laundry.

  They had, however, undertaken a very detailed examination of the kitchens. Sister Assumpta was well aware that the councillors had assumed the food being prepared for the nuns was also for the girls. It wasn’t for her to disabuse them of that notio
n.

  ‘Sure, do they think girls eat beef stew when they are steeped in sin?’ asked Sister Celia, running along beside her as they walked to mass. ‘Do they not understand the job we have here, to keep these girls under control? If we fed them what we ate, they would think they were forgiven and become impossible to manage. For the sake of heaven, why would they think they know better than we?’

  The visitors had, in fact, been extremely impressed with Sister Assumpta’s facilities and soul-saving discipline. It served them no purpose to agree with the complaints made by Dublin’s most senior midwife. Who did she think would look after such wayward girls if the holy nuns didn’t, and at what cost?

  ‘Sure, God alone knows the money these nuns save us and the good they do,’ one councillor had whispered to another as they surveyed the spotless kitchens where a rich beef stew was being stirred by a smiling nun.

  The officials had understood the need for cleanliness and obedience.

  They had needed no convincing that redemption from sin was to be achieved via hard work. There was even talk that they would send them more girls, because they felt the Abbey could easily handle an increase in numbers.

  More girls meant more money.

  ‘That high and mighty, overeducated Rosie O’Grady will not be happy if she discovers that her interfering has brought us more penitents,’ Sister Assumpta had grumbled. ‘I wonder if she knows her complaining has made things better for us. I have no notion what it is that woman was trying to achieve by reporting us to the authorities, as she has half a dozen times. Will she not stop?’

  As she prayed, Sister Assumpta gave thanks that the councillors hadn’t asked to look at her paperwork, nor enquired what happened to the girls or the babies who died. There were no death certificates to show them, only plots of earth in the garden. Underneath the weeping willows.

  Disgraced girls who had arrived at the convent from the country were not even given the grace of a requiem mass, nor a name – their own name – to mark their graves. Only the penitents who came directly from the industrial schools run by the brothers or other convents were issued with a death certificate, but, even then, not always. Money came into the Abbey for living penitents, not dead ones. On occasion, Sister Assumpta would delay as long as a year before informing the authorities that a girl had died.

  The dead babies and children were laid together, deep in the earth. She had lost count of how many there were or even what their names had been. There must have been hundreds by now. The nuns had begun digging the plot over fifty years ago at the turn of the century. The previous Reverend Mother had kept a ledger in which she entered in ink the name of each child and the date they were buried. Sister Assumpta had thought for a long time now that the ledger needed to be destroyed.

  Babies were lost in childbirth. For those who survived, many fell victim to disease and infection.

  Their pitiful bodies had been preserved in the gently receiving, peat-rich earth, condemned to purgatory for eternity.

  When mass was over, Sister Celia took the Reverend Mother her lunch on a tray: boiled beef left over from the previous evening’s supper, with salad leaves that the nuns grew in their own garden, and an apple pie, made by Sister Celia from the apples stored in the straw-layered wicker baskets, down in the dark cellar.

  ‘Put the tray by the fireplace,’ said Sister Assumpta as Sister Celia wobbled precariously through the door, ‘and stay for your own. I’d like you to join me as I don’t feel like eating alone today.’

  Sister Celia flushed with pride. She was the only nun the Reverend Mother ever invited to eat with her.

  ‘I’ll be right back then,’ she gabbled and rushed from the room with the empty tray.

  Sister Assumpta took over to the fire the few letters she hadn’t yet tackled and, after pouring the tea, she picked up the last remaining airmail letter.

  She noticed it was from America, but this was not unusual by any means. Sister Assumpta received such letters every day. Sometimes they were from priests, writing on behalf of families in need of a baby or a child to adopt easily and quickly. Sometimes the families wrote themselves.

  Some might be letters containing begging pleas and offers of money from barren parents willing to pay any price to adopt a child of their own.

  Shovelling into her mouth a huge bite of salted beef and lettuce, sandwiched between freshly buttered white bread, the Reverend Mother leant back in the chair, flicked open the letter with the ornate silver-and-bone-handled knife and began to read.

  ‘I’m back,’ Sister Celia trilled as she waddled through the office door, laden with an ample lunch for her own consumption.

  Reverend Mother didn’t answer.

  ‘What is wrong?’ Sister Cecilia enquired. ‘You look a little pale. Is it the beef? Is it all right now? We saved the best cut for you, Reverend Mother.’ Sister Assumpta still did not reply.

  She turned the letter over in her hand and looked at the sender’s address on the back of the envelope. And then she turned it round and read it again.

  ‘It concerns the child who was adopted by the Moynihans in Chicago, the builders who paid us three thousand dollars for the baby if they could take it quickly. The baby is sick and they need to know who the mother is. They are on their way here on an aeroplane to talk to us. As if we need more visitors. We may as well open as an hotel and start charging an entry fee.’

  ‘Ye can’t tell them that anyway.’ Sister Celia looked shocked. ‘It is against the rules, and the authorities wouldn’t allow it. Besides, who is the mother? Is she a penitent?’

  ‘No, it was the girl Rosie O’Grady sent and delivered.’

  ‘Oh, Heavenly Father, no.’

  The flush faded from Sister Celia’s own cheeks. Rosie O’Grady was trouble. Nothing had been the same since the day she had taken that girl. They had even had a reporter knocking at the door last week because Rosie O’Grady had written a letter to the newspaper, calling for an explanation of the role of the laundries and the mother and baby homes.

  ‘What will ye tell them?’ Sister Celia asked.

  ‘I will tell them the truth, which is all I do know: that the girl’s name was Cissy, and that she came from Liverpool. She kept her own name because of that Rosie O’Grady’s involvement. I shall send them straight on to see Mrs O’Grady in Dublin. Let her deal with it. We upheld our part of the bargain; the girl has nothing to do with us. She was neither a penitent in the laundry nor a country girl from the mother and baby home. She was a favour we did for the matron. I hope they aren’t after getting their money back just because the child is sick.’

  Sister Assumpta gazed into the fire deep in contemplation while Sister Celia ate. The airmail letter hung loosely in her hand and rested on her knee.

  She startled Sister Celia when without warning she said, ‘There is no moon tonight, Sister Celia. I want all the ledgers from the locked cupboard to be carried out to the midden. Everything, all the papers dating right back from when the first girl arrived here sixty years ago, except for the contracts each girl signed, agreeing to surrender her baby. Set the lot on fire. We can’t be blamed for what can’t be proven.’

  ‘Sure, well, we will do that, Reverend Mother. I’ve plenty of girls to get that done, but then what?’

  ‘No, don’t use the girls. Don’t even use the novices. Let this be done by the nuns. I don’t want the girls’ prying eyes seeing this, not that any of them can read. We will burn the lot and, tomorrow, we will pay a visit to the sisters up the road at St Vincent’s and suggest they do the same. They have been here only a few years but, sure, they will be keeping good records, I have no doubt.

  ‘That Sister Theresa was always a stickler. I don’t want people assuming that what they practise there, we follow suit here. More secrecy is what is needed and, if I know Sister Theresa, that won’t even have crossed her mind. Oh, yes, come along in now, she would say to anyone who asked. She always was a foolish woman who could never see what was right under her very nose
. They would have her tied up in knots. We will drive over first thing in the morning.’

  10

  ‘SHALL I WAIT, nurse? Will he be long or would you rather I came back in half an hour?’

  Stanley was instructed to wait. It was a Monday morning in the X-ray department of the children’s hospital. The nurse was obviously keen to finish and empty the department so that she could rush to the canteen and meet the other nurses for their post-weekend, lunchtime gossip.

  Stanley sat on one of the hard wooden benches as he waited for the young boy he had brought in a wheelchair to be pushed back out to him. In the meantime, he took the opportunity to roll up two cigarettes for both himself and Austin, then carefully laid them on a bed of tobacco in his tin, which he slipped back into the large pocket of his brown overall.

  Stanley always experienced the same frisson of excitement when he took a call at the porter’s lodge to collect a little lad from the children’s ward. This one had been a disappointment. He was far too young.

  Stanley had standards. He regarded himself as above the others in the ring, especially Austin.

  Just at that moment, Austin breezed into the X-ray department in his long brown porter’s coat and sat next to Stanley, having himself wheeled into the department another child from the same ward.

  Austin seemed agitated.

  ‘She’s back,’ he whispered to Stanley.

  ‘Who’s back?’ Stanley asked. A puzzled frown sat on his face.

  ‘The housekeeper, Daisy, she escaped and she’s back.’

  ‘Jesus, are you fucking joking?’

  ‘Do I look like I’m fucking joking?’

  Indeed, Austin was as white as a sheet.

  ‘How? How did that fucking happen? I thought the bishop had sorted it and that she was put away?’

  ‘He did and she was, but she is back and she has fingered the policeman, Simon, the one who took her to the home. I knew it was fucking crazy, sending someone she could finger if she was asked.’